


Gravegone

by LyricOcean



Category: Life Is Strange (Video Game)
Genre: Bae Ending, F/F, F/M, Seeing the dead, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-12-05
Updated: 2019-12-06
Packaged: 2021-02-24 16:08:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,615
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21680716
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LyricOcean/pseuds/LyricOcean
Summary: The events in Arcadia Bay as told by Nathan and Victoria, but this time Max isn't the only one with powers.Nathan can see the dead, and not all of them are happy.Victoria struggles with romantic feelings towards Max, who blames her for Kate's death.
Relationships: Maxine "Max" Caulfield/Chloe Price, Maxine "Max" Caulfield/Victoria Chase, Rachel Amber/Chloe Price, Rachel Amber/Nathan Prescott
Comments: 2
Kudos: 23





	1. Awake

**Author's Note:**

> This first chapter is a bit short but there's more coming soon

Sometimes he wouldn’t wake until the afternoon, when the amber glow of the room warped itself around his misted breath. He never remembered his dreams. His transitions into the waking world had always been as definite and mechanical as the click of a gear change, or a bullet sliding into its chamber. 

It helped that the air was kept so cold it hurt his nose. His habit was to keep the room in perpetual winter; had been so for the three years he’d lived there. For the sake of the camera equipment, which sometimes he felt he valued more than his own life. 

And for her. 

Usually she was beside him on the bed when he opened his eyes. Locks of hair trapping the light, smiling with only her mouth. An army of lost souls behind her, monochrome and framed on his walls: a stumbling man, a gravedigger at night, a dead dog on the side of the road. His art, his life. She was the only good this place had ever known. 

On those mornings he’d watch her with the unblinking intensity of a crocodile in water.    


“I love you,” he’d say, reaching for her face. His fingers never shook. 

“You don’t,” she’d reply. 

His fingers would pass through her face and hit the pillow, and he’d sigh, the dehydration rawing his throat. Incomprehensible. 

Throughout his life he’d maintained a strict firewall around his feelings. Brains were biological computers: anything he thought or felt was a chemical reaction, and Nathan was determined to bottle it, to analyse it. Discipline was of the utmost importance. 

Yet she had broken through his coding, had forced him from his tower of 1s and 0s into something he had no explanation for. 

“I love you,” he’d say again, thinking of chemicals. 

“You don’t know what love is,” Rachel would tell him.

He would have no reply. After all, the dead cannot lie. 


	2. Storm

“I don’t think she was completely alive.” 

Victoria frowned, trying to process what Nathan meant. His face was an impassive frown, cast in shadow from the afternoon sun behind him. 

In these moments when he was marble, she knew to watch his hands: his fingers were rigid, restless, clutched protectively around his camera. Whatever happened had made a big impact on him. 

“You mean… she was dying?” Victoria asked, crossing her arms. “Maybe she has terminal cancer and doesn’t even know it.” 

It was a point of pride for her that she’d been the first — and only — person he’d told about his powers. She’d known him since they were children through their families, though they hadn’t become friends until they both came to Blackwell. A few months ago, he told her he had a conversation with his deceased grandmother last night. 

She thought he was going crazy, until he'd taken her hand and showed her. There was no calling him crazy after that. 

“No,” he said, motes of distracted anger blowing into his tone. “She was dead. But she was alive at the same time.” 

Someone walked past at that point, a guy whose name Victoria couldn’t remember. She waited until he was out of earshot. 

“Do you think she has powers too?” She asked. The wrong thing to say. 

“Chloe doesn’t have fucking powers,” Nathan muttered, locking his robin’s egg eyes on hers. “She’s just a dumb slut trying to blackmail me. I almost fucking shot her.” 

“Maybe,” Victoria said, “because you wanted to, that’s why it felt that way. Maybe you can sense when people are about to die.” She held her breath, hoping her answer was acceptable. 

Despite his philosophies on discipline and control, Nathan had been increasingly irate lately. He said it was controlled anger, which made it different, but Victoria didn’t understand where the control was in screaming your lungs raw and punching blood from your knuckles. She hadn’t so much as seen him smile in weeks, and that had been drug assisted. But then again, when was the last time she’d smiled? 

Nathan sighed, dropping the tension. “You don’t get it,” he said. “She was dead and alive at the same time. Schrodinger’s bitch. You have paint on your face.” 

Her fingers flew up to cover the spot. “Just an accident,” she said.

“Yeah?” 

“Yeah. Samuel was painting or some shit and the paint can fell. And just before that, the sprinklers spazzed out and ruined my outfit. It was whatever.” The memory was sour on her tongue as she spoke. 

Nathan snorted. “Anyone see you?” 

She hesitated. Of course she’d been seen. She’d been seen by the worst possible person to be seen by, Max Caulfield. 

Max had had all the opportunity in the world to gut her for it, when Victoria had done the same to her minutes before. Instead, she’d been sympathetic, complimenting her coat and photography. 

Victoria’s heart had been racing the whole time, trying to calculate possibilities. Was Max just making fun of her in her own way? Was she genuinely sorry for her? Had Victoria really looked that pathetic? Or was there something else Max thought about her, felt for her, in the same way Victoria felt for Max? 

Victoria’s eyes drifted back up to Nathan’s, which were fixed on her, looking almost black in the shadows. Blood was rushing in her ears. 

“No,” she said. “No one saw me.” 

But obviously he wasn’t listening, because he grabbed her hand, sending cold waves up her arm and through her body. 

“Something’s happening,” he said. 

Nathan had always described lending his powers to people as an act of bleeding. All he needed was skin to skin contact.

The coldness spread all the way through Victoria. She blinked, and Rachel was sitting on the bench beside them, mid-way through a sentence. 

“—by the lighthouse. She’s here now, but it’s also Friday.” 

“What?” Victoria asked, and Rachel shot her a hard look. When Rachel was alive, her irises had been a gentle shade of moss agate. But the dead have no irises. 

“It’s what I was trying to tell you,” Nate said. “People are alive and dead. They’re here now and at the end of the week. It’s like…” 

“It’s like someone is altering time,” Rachel said. “Which they are.” 

Victoria looked from Nathan in his red jacket to Rachel in her red flannel. The colour of passion, of anger. How fitting they looked together. 

Finally Victoria asked, “How can you tell?” 

“The dead aren’t affected by time,” Rachel said. “Nor by space. For example, I'm with you both right now. But I’m also at the lighthouse, at the present moment and in four days. Max is… hm.” She stopped talking, and put a hand to the side of Nathan’s face, showing him something. 

Victoria tried to feel through the power flow in Nathan’s hand what it was, but it was like an impassable wall had been put up to block her. 

Nathan’s eyes widened, and his hand slipped from hers as he banged his fists on the table. Rachel disappeared in an instant. 

It was strange to be somewhere so peaceful, yet feel such an overriding sense of dread. The sun was lower in the sky now, and Nathan’s hair burnt so brightly it hurt her eyes. The wind blew in gentle billows, carrying with it the soft cries of birds and wildlife. Someone coming from the dorms was laughing, a carefree sound, echoing down to the road behind them where no doubt people were going about their normal lives, maybe listening to music or asking their children how their school day had gone. 

“Things just got interesting,” Nathan said finally, sounding miserable. 

“How so?” 

“A storm is coming,” he said. And then he shivered despite the warmth of the day. 

Though he wasn’t holding her hand anymore, the cold feeling stayed in Victoria’s body, stinging at her wrists, the tip of her nose. 

“I’m going for a walk,” she decided. “To process. I’ll be back soon.” 

She stood and let her feet carry her for a moment, lost in thought. What had he meant? A storm is coming? She knew enough by now to know any further questioning would lead to answers so vague and nebulous she’d be more frustrated than if she hadn’t asked him. Why hadn’t Rachel wanted to show her? They’d never gotten along in life, and death certainly hadn’t improved things between them. Perhaps she still held a grudge? Victoria still didn’t even know how she’d died. The first and only time she’d asked Nathan, he’d gotten so mad she was afraid to ask again. 

She was missing too much information. It was intolerable. 

Once she was in front of the notice board she stopped walking. It seemed Rachel’s face was following her everywhere today. 

There was a new poster, an A4 piece of paper bearing Rachel’s face, declaring she was missing. It must have been Chloe who had put these up, making the most of her visit to Blackwell. 

Bitter hatred began to rise in her throat. What a waste of time. What a fucking waste of time. 

She ripped the poster from the board and was about to rip it in half when the first of the snowflakes landed on her head. 

Stepping back and looking around, she discovered the air was full of them. Drifting softly, swaying in the wind like a song in physical form, kissing her skin wherever they made contact. An impossibility. And yet, there they were. 

Victoria stood locked to the spot, her heart rate creeping up again, cloaked in a sense of dread so intense it hurt her head. Nathan’s words ringing and replaying like they would never stop. 

_ A storm is coming.  _


End file.
